Schadenfreude: the Film
There’s something gleefully demented about a certain sort of action movie that turns what would be horrific in any other context into something funny. Mel Brooks once said, “Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.” Certain films, such as Boy Kills World, released for general audiences in 2024 after a festival run in 2023, seek to expand that latter point much farther than just falling down manholes, and see humor in the most demented of ways for human beings to leave this life. This film, directed by Moritz Mohr and written by Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers, is one that absolutely glories in finding interesting new ways to kill people.
The setting of this film is distinctly ambiguous. It is a city in some sort of tropical area, with no particular geographic location even mentioned. The ethnic composition is diverse, and everyone appears to speak English, perhaps due to globalization, or perhaps due to translation convention, as TVTropes so helpfully pointed out (and I feel like I should have realized it myself). In any case, it feels almost like an old-school utopian work’s setting, a place of jungles and savannahs with an interesting form of government designed to play host to the fantasies of educated white people. Perhaps I am biased by having recently read Thomas More’s Utopia, but it feels like that sort of setting, except with more graphic violence and Schadenfreude.
This city has been, within living memory, taken over by a family of business empresarios who rule its inhabitants with an iron fist. Their rule is capricious, their enforcement arbitrary, their laws frivolous, and their aesthetic tastes decidedly gauche. Your protagonist is first seen as a boy, growing up in the dawn of their rule, and through a series of somewhat convoluted events he finds himself exiled from his family, living in the jungle with a master martial artist, learning the art of fighting and killing.
You would be right in assuming that a lot of the characters are somewhat cut-and-paste from other action movies. The trainer is something of an Orientalist stereotype of East Asian martial arts master, training your white male hero (played by Bill Skarsgård) in that which he will use to gain his revenge. What makes Skarsgård’s character unique is one of the film’s saving graces: he is deaf. This means he interacts with the world in an entirely different way than most action movie protagonists, and he narrates much of the film in his own head (he was not born deaf). Other characters, though performed well, are either stereotypes or just odd, perhaps offensively. There is a Black character who Skarsgård’s character is not familiar with, which means he cannot read his lips, and this is rendered by him speaking in coherent albeit nonsensical sentences, which are followed for the sake of comedy; this felt like a caricature in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The villains are your typical evil rich people, something like those of The Hunger Games, who get some good hammy dialogue and some amusingly sadistic moments. There’s a femme fatale of sorts who wears a helmet almost the entire film and is almost constantly baring her midriff, which likewise felt stereotypical, although to the film’s credit she has a compelling arc of her own; indeed she is the source of much of the film’s emotional weight. She has the most compelling performance, supplied deftly by Jessica Rothe.
But the real reason why most people would show up to this film is that they were lulled by its promise of deranged graphic violence. A moviegoer seeking such things will be amply pleased by this film. It reminded me in several ways of The Hitman’s Bodyguard, a funny and demented action-comedy from a few years back starring Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds being, respectively, Samuel L. Jackson and Ryan Reynolds. The most recognizable performer in Boy Kills World is Sharlto Copley, so it doesn’t get to reap the star power the former film does, but it is more fantastic than the previous film, so the action is less moored in reality and therefore novel in its own way. The high point of the film, depicted to some degree in the trailers, is on a Christmas-esque set of a cereal advertisement for the company that is sponsoring the ruling family’s annual bouts of mass murder. It’s certainly a creative set piece; that alone makes this worth the price of admission.
Boy Kills World is an action movie with the sense of humor and aesthetic of Francisco Macias Nguema. For those unfamiliar with him, he was the autocratic ruler of the small African nation of Equatorial Guinea from 1968 to 1979 who had 168 suspected enemies of the state rounded up in a football stadium and shot or hanged by executioners dressed as Santa Claus while Mary Hopkins’ famous cover of Those Were the Days played in the background; a select few were fed to ants. It took a constellation of odd, perhaps demented minds to make Boy Kills World; the product has its flaws, but for a certain type of person, like myself, it is a good time.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
Highlights: graphic violence, also graphic violence.
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
